Untangle Yourself with Chakra Meditation

If you’ve ever tried to untangle your headphone cords, you know that the most difficult part is trying to figure out where the whole tangled mess starts! If you are distracted or in a hurry, you will pull in all directions, make a few more knots, blame whoever has recently pissed your off for the whole mess, and go back to walking around being half-strangled by hopelessly tangled cords. Meanwhile beneath the protective outer sheath of the cord, the delicate copper wires that ensure the quality of the sound reaching your ears are slowly degenerating. Of course the alternative to living with the chaos (or chucking your headphones across the room!) is to pause and patiently trace all of the strands forming the knots back to some stating point and than gradually, strand by strand, untie the knots to preserve the quality of the intricate wiring beneath. What does all of this have to do with yoga? Well, the yogis say that our bodies and minds are kind of like those cords and most of us walk around all tangled up. And those physical and mental knots obstruct the energy flowing through us and prevent us from moving through the world with clarity and purpose. We react (and often over-react!) without really understanding the source of our anger, frustration, sadness, or fear. We’re too busy to stop and try to figure the whole mess out so we just leave ourselves tangled and decide that our poor decisions are inevitable or are injuries are someone else’s fault. Sounds kind of bleak, right? But yoga is that moment when you decide to pause, breathe, and attempt to trace the individual strands weaving the knots you’ve tied yourself in. As you move through yoga postures and sit for meditation, you feel the places your mind is tangled and compromising the flow of energy through your body. Gradually and patiently you trace those tangles back to their source, untie the knots, and restore the integrity of the structures that allow energy to flow through you.

The yogis identify the cords of us as physical, astral, and causal and the place where all these strands spiral together as the chakras. Chakra meditation is when you try to feel the tangles and knots in the cords of yourself and trace things back to their origin. As you untangle the knots, your inner wiring has more integrity and energy flows more freely through your body like sound flows through the chords of your headphones.

In my last workshop of 2016, we’ll investigate our physical, astral, and causal bodies through movement, pranayama (breathing techniques), and chakra meditation. We will work from the outer surface into the deeper, more subtle layers of the body and mind, gathering attention inwards and circulating energy through all three bodies.

Bring your curiosity and a meditation journal and join me at Ohana Yoga on Saturday November 19 from 2-5pm. Click here for bookings. Click on the flyer below to read more or share it with a friend!